It came as no big surprise to anyone at all that US President Barack Obama made a speech filled with noble intentions, but very little concrete action, on the issue of climate change at the Climate Change Summit, which just concluded in New York. Environment activist had great hopes that the US President would think "out of the box" and take the lead in ensuring that the US, one of...

Here’s a hypothetical, though not altogether unfamiliar, scenario that academic and writer Sunil Khilnani invoked in a lecture at the British Museum to warn against what he called the “paradox of India’s new prosperity.” He asked his audience to imagine two traffic lanes, both at a standstill. After a while traffic in one of the lanes starts moving raising hopes of those stuck in the next lane that they, too,...

Concern over the domestic economy should not result in barriers on free trade, according to Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry Jyotiraditya Scindia. While the country would benefit from opening itself up further to international competition, he promised that the interests of farmers and labour-intensive industries would be protected. In a discussion with journalists from The Hindu group on Wednesday, Mr. Scindia defended the Free Trade Agreement (FTA)...

A commission set up to look into alternative ways of measuring economic and social progress has added to the existing debate but not made any real advances.  FOR some time now it has been clear that standard measurements of growth and development are inadequate and possibly even misleading. The problem of looking at only the aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) has been widely noted: its blindness to distributional issues and...

India’s growth is not falling, although it is not as high as before If there is a crisis, there should be economics to deal with it; what use are economists if they are not around to help out when things get bad? And it is not enough to have economics. There was plenty of economics in 1929. As output and employment plummeted, economists said, this is good. It will take...